I Tried an Agentic OS: Hermes Apollo and the Autonomous AI Agent Ecosystem

I'd been hearing from a lot of places that the AI trend was moving beyond plain text chat toward agentic operating systems that perceive the user's working environment directly and carry out tasks on their own. Through a video published by creator Julian Goldie, I got a look at Hermes Apollo — an AI assistant that works with both voice and vision — and at the integrated agent system behind it. This post is my own take on the core features the video covered.

1. Real-time screen awareness and voice interaction

• Context understanding from the screen: Hermes Apollo perceives directly, through the screen, what program the user currently has open and what they're working on. If an Obsidian note or source code under development is open, for instance, it picks up the context of the current project and answers immediately without the user having to explain anything. The part that made the biggest practical difference to me was not having to re-explain the background every time.
• Real-time conversation and free voice switching: Voice feedback comes back instantly with almost no latency, and features like "Hermes Oracle" let you switch to whatever voice you want, whenever.
• Multitasking mode (War Mode): Beyond a full-screen interface, it also supports War Mode, which runs quietly in the background while delivering daily briefings or monitoring live status. You can also have the text-based Hermes window and the voice-based Apollo window open at the same time and process different tasks in parallel.

2. Cost-efficient architecture (CLI and existing subscriptions)

Getting away from a structure that relies solely on expensive external API calls is a big strength of this system. It integrates directly with subscriptions you already use — ChatGPT and the like — plus a CLI (command line interface) for voice, so you can stand up a high-performance voice agent environment without taking on a huge additional API bill. It also shows the extensibility to absorb free APIs or updates from the latest models (Step 5, Opus 5.5, and so on). Cost is the biggest stumbling block for an individual running an agent system, so an approach that routes around that part stood out to me.

3. Obsidian and central memory sync

Conversation records and work history with Hermes Apollo sync automatically and in real time to your personal notes in Obsidian. This memory hub is shared with the other AI agents running in the background (daily update automation, marketing agents, and so on), so no matter which agent you invoke, it shares a complete picture of your recent project state and can collaborate. Having the memory in one place makes a real difference when you're running multiple agents at once.

4. Staret: the pixel office as a visualized multi-agent workspace

The element that stood out most in the video was Staret, which visualizes AI agents at work as a retro pixel-art office. This isn't just a visual effect — it's a space where real, working AI agents handling roles like marketer, engineer, and web designer are actually operating in the background. You can see each agent's task history, execution logs, and outputs with your own eyes, and you can add new agents or departments (an engineering office, say) and hand out work. Being able to see at a glance what's actually running was the convenient part from an administrator's point of view.

5. Automated business and content workspaces

• Content and SEO automation: Performance metrics and numbers across multiple websites sync in real time via a drop-down menu. From keyword research through content generation to distribution, the whole chain interlocks organically inside the memory system.
• AI video generation agent: Enter a new news headline or idea, and the AI agent writes the script off it and automatically assembles and produces the video. It ships with a video workspace feature built for that.

6. Community and implementation support (AI Profit Boardroom)

For users who find it hard to build a complex agentic OS system themselves, Julian Goldie runs the AI Profit Boardroom community and classroom. They produce customized video tutorials for the parts you get stuck on during setup, and provide a step-by-step roadmap plus the full source code as a ZIP file, so everyone from beginners to experts can customize the system themselves.

Bottom line

I think Hermes Apollo and the agentic OS are the most realistic realization yet of "a future where AI sees my screen, remembers my notes, and works alongside me like a colleague in a virtual office." For solo entrepreneurs and developers trying to automate repetitive work and raise their efficiency in development and content production, it's a genuinely inspiring system.

That said, I don't think you need to have a system like this fully assembled from day one. In my own case, my homepage settled into shape by building the features I needed, one at a time. I'd treat this system the same way — as a reference case — and apply the parts that fit my working environment, step by step. That's probably the more accurate approach.

Original video: Watch on YouTube